LDG

Update: we had to change plans, so Burn Tactics is no longer under development.

We recently started developing our next game, tentatively called Burn Tactics. The concept is a turn-based medieval fantasy strategy game where players control a vengeful dragon who's intent on burning down villages and seeking havoc on the kingdom.

While we're still very early in development, we've already made wireframes for every screen in the game and have figured out how the interface will flow in its entirety. As you can see from the included images, we'll be periodically uploading (really rough and ugly!) screenshots of our progress. We even have some game code written; we're using the impact HTML5 game engine and are so far really liking it.

Why we chose to work on this game

We've had probably a dozen ideas for what to work on next including puzzle games, RTS games, or even a sequel to Onslaught! Arena. Among all these directions we could go, we decided to work on Burn Tactics for the following reasons:

Accessibility

Though many players are enjoying Onslaught! Arena, we've also heard that some of them are turned off by certain features, including:

• Retro look and feel: the 8-bit graphics and sound are very appealing to some players (including us!) but many aren't familiar with and/or nostalgic about NES-era games or just think it's overplayed as an art direction.
• Difficulty: very difficult, requires quick reflexes and excellent dexterity. (Even our girlfriends don't want to play it because it requires twitch skills they don't enjoy learning and so never acquired!)
• Controls: we've heard many complaints about all kinds of problems with the controls. They're too complicated (with mouse and keyboard options), too buried (not exposing all keyboard shortcuts in the UI) and not customizable (giving non-QWERTY users a headache). Burn Tactics will have a simple click/touch-only interface.
• Sluggish performance: Chrome users currently have hardware-accelerated graphics in Onslaught! Arena, which certainly helps, but tons of monsters and weapons on-screen can be very taxing on older computers and browsers (making it easy to die and very frustrating).

Burn Tactics is a concept that shouldn't have these problems, so hopefully it'll appeal to a larger audience of gamers.

Small in scope

As you may have read before, we both have bad habits of letting our game concepts explode into unclimbable mountains. Given that, our mantra for Burn Tactics is:

• Ridiculously simple turn-based strategy game.
• Keep it simple.
• Polish, polish, polish.

Mobile-friendly

While we would love to get Onslaught! Arena onto mobile platforms such as Android and iPad, there are many hurdles and in some cases, brick walls. Conversely, Burn Tactics is being designed from the ground up to make it feasible to get onto mobile/touch devices. This is great because releasing Onslaught! Arena onto these devices has been one of our most common requests.

We're still working on Onslaught! Arena

We've got some issues we're looking into fixing and we're also trying to get Onslaught! Arena into the new Mac OSX App Store.

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